Hard truths about social investing: round table with Sasa Vucinic

  

With more than 20 years experience as both social entrepreneur and social investor, Sasa Vucinic, Co-Founder of the Media Development Loan Fund, will share candidly about the struggles faced by early stage high potential social entrepreneurs and how social investors can effectively partner with these individuals to address some of their critical needs.  Meet the man who was rejected funding by George Soros twice but successfully received $500,000 in seed funding from Soros’ Open Society Institute to grow MDLF – recently renamed to Media Development Investment Fund – to an impact investor extending $130 million in loans, equity investments and other forms of financing.

About Sasa Vucinic

Sasa co-founded Media Development Loan Fund in 1995 and served as its founding Managing Director (CEO) from 1995 until March 2011. Sasa and MDLF co-founder Stuart Auerbach, shared a passion for quality journalism and a belief that independent news media are essential to sustained political, social and economic development.

Together they launched a ‘media bank’ to help journalists in countries with a history of media oppression build sustainable news businesses, strong enough to stay independent of governments, political parties and oligarchs. 17 years after making its first loan to a small Slovakian newspaper called SME, MDLF has provided over $130 million in affordable financing and helped more than 90 independent news businesses in 32 countries to flourish and grow.

The organization changed its name to Media Development Investment Fund in January 2013.

More recently, Sasa founded IndieVoices (www.IndieVoic.es), the first crowdfunding portal for independent media in the developing world, as well as co-founded North Base Media, an impact investment fund focusing on media in the emerging markets.

Sasa graduated in international law from the University of Belgrade in 1985 and attended The General Manager Program (TGMP) at Harvard Business School in 2000. He was named a Global Leader of Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum in 2000 and named a Senior Ashoka Fellow in 2008.